Trevor Hogg profiles the career of three time Academy Award-winning sound designer and film editor Walter Murch in the third of a five part feature… read parts one and two.
“I was interested to go back and look at the two films I edited, The Conversation [1974] and Julia [1977], which I had done “mechanically” – physically cutting the film itself,” mused the multi-talented Walter Murch. “I made the transition to “electronic,” – and started working on the Avid in 1995, I was curious to see if there was any difference between my mechanical and electronic styles. There wasn’t – in fact I was struck on how immediate the earlier films seemed. I would make the same editorial choices today.” The advent of computer technology in film editing has resulted in a couple of serious drawbacks for the craft. “When you actually had to make the cut physically on film, you naturally tended to think more about what you were about to do,” remarked the New York native. “Which — in the right proportion — is a good thing to do. The cut is a kind of sacramental moment. When I was in grade school they made us write our essays in ink for the same reason. Pencil was too easy to erase. The other “missing” advantage to linear editing was the natural integration of repeatedly scanning through rolls of film to get to a shot you wanted. Inevitably, before you ever got there, you found something that was better than what you had in mind. With random access, you immediately get what you want. Which may not be what you need.”
Adjusting to life beyond the Moviola (the original machine used for motion picture editing), Walter Murch collaborated with British filmmaker Anthony Minghella for the cinematic adaptation of the WWII saga The English Patient (1996). A French Canadian nurse, Hana (Juliette Binoche), cares for a dying burn victim, Almásy (Ralph Fiennes), who recalls his tragic illicit love affair with Katharine (Kristin Scott Thomas). “It starts out with two mysterious figures in a plane, flying across the desert,” stated Murch who worked both as a film editor and a re-recording mixer on the WWII saga based on a novel penned by Michael Ondaatje. “The plane gets shot down by the Germans and then – cut – you’re on a train with a young woman, a nurse, in a completely different situation, bantering with wounded soldiers. The two stories appear to have nothing to do with each other, but the audience trusts that these two rivers are going to come together. You follow Hana and her story, then cut back to the Patient going through the desert on the back of a camel; then you cut to Hana again. And you reach a point where almost accidentally these two stories fuse – it just happens that when the Patient is being interrogated as a possible spy, Hana is the nurse who gives him a glass of water. Later their stories merge even more closely; she takes him out of the convoy into the monastery, and they spend the rest of the film together.”
Interweaving the multiple storylines seamlessly was not an easy matter for Walter Murch. “With Patient there was a tremendous amount of experimentation in how the stories collide with one another. Of the forty transitions, I think only seven remained the way they were in the screenplay. Everything else was reinvented to take advantage of the film’s strengths.” To provoke the necessary emotional response from audiences, Murch manipulated the soundtrack for the picture. “The desert is a vast space. When you’re there, the feeling it evokes is psychic as well as physical. The problem is that if you record the actual sound that goes with that space, it has nothing to do with the emotion of being there. In fact it’s a very empty, sterile sound…The trick in The English Patient was to evoke, with sound, a space that is silent. We did it by adding insect-like sounds that realistically would probably not be there.”
For Walter Murch, there is a particular moment in the movie which stands out as being a dramatic combination of sound and circumstance. “The love scene at the Christmas party is dangerous because of what’s happening. It’s Christmas, after all, and Almásy and Katharine are an adulterous couple making love in a semi-public place. If somebody came around the corner at the wrong time, it would be a disaster. The sexual charge of the scene is enhanced, complicated by the danger. Not only is there complexity in the physical geography of the party – how they meet, what he says to her, and where they go – the soundscape of that scene is very complex. There is Arabic music and there are people singing Christmas carols, improbably, in Cairo. A very English party. Then there is the love theme, the orchestral music. All three are going on at the same time.” Murch added, “I would say that in that particular scene the collision of emotions, the contradictory mess of emotions, is being amplified more by the soundtrack than by anything I am doing in the picture editing.”
Adapting the story for the big screen resulted in a key scene, which occurred at the end of the book, being changed. “The film was so much about those five individual people: the Patient, Hana, Kip [Naveen Andrews] , Katharine, Caravaggio [Willem Dafoe] – that to suddenly open it up near the end and ask the audience to imagine the death of hundreds of thousands of unknown people…It was too abstract,” explained Walter Murch. “So the bomb of Hiroshima became the bomb that killed Hardy, someone you knew. Everything else reorganized itself from that new starting point.” For his cinematic contributions to the 1996 Academy Award-winning Best Picture, Murch was co-awarded the Oscars for Best Editing and Best Sound; the Cinema Audio Society co-presented him the C.A.S. Award for Best Sound Mixing – Feature Film, the American Cinema Editors lauded Murch with the Eddie for Best Edited Feature Film, and the BAFTAs honoured him with Best Editing and a co-nomination for Best Sound.
An unexpected phone call from Rick Schmidlin, led to Walter Murch reading the complete fifty-eight page memo written by Orson Welles (Citizen Kane) outlining the required revisions for the crime thriller Touch of Evil (1958). “The memo is inspiring for its raison d’être – which was to lay out the things Welles felt were wrong with the studio version of the film, and what he felt could be done to correct it, within its own terms,” said an impressed Murch. “It worked out to contain approximately fifty practical suggestions, beginning right away with the removal of Henry Mancini’s opening music.” Schmidlin had convinced Universal Studios to reassemble the picture according to Orson Welles’ specifications; impressed with Murch’s work on The Conversation, he wanted him to spearhead the 1998 project. “In the end, we were able to accommodate all fifty changes, even though all we had was the original negative and the magnetic soundtrack. No outtakes had been saved, of course, though they were available when Welles wrote his memo. What helped immeasurably were some of the new digital techniques – unimaginable when the film was originally shot.”
The modern computer technology was put to good use with the famous opening camera tracking shot that follows a vehicle traveling into Mexico with a clock bomb that explodes in real time. “We were able to remove the titles, since we luckily discovered a “textless background” in one of the cans of negative. This was then digitally rewoven into the fabric of the film, so you can’t tell where the transition takes place.” The music soundtrack was changed from bongos and brass to “overlapping fragments of source music” alternating and interweaving between Afro-Cuban and rock and roll music throughout the film as the action repeatedly goes back and forth across the American-Mexican border. “The moments when the car with the bomb approaches the camera are much tenser now than they were in the earlier version. The bomb car also has a musical signature, a certain song on its radio that helps to identify it and tell you it’s getting closer even when you haven’t seen it yet.” Contemplating the differences between the two pictures, Murch observed, “What’s nice about the new version of the film is that the opening shot now acts as a prelude to the events that follow. It settles you into your chair and presents you, in miniature, with all the themes and ideas that the following piece of cinema is about to investigate.”
Asked to explain the classic film, Walter Murch replied, “Touch of Evil is, in a way, an investigation of the idea of ‘borderness’. What is a border? What are our expectations of the people who live there? Welles plays tricks and upsets those expectations. In an earlier, non-Welles draft of the screenplay, the American detective was a Texas Ranger. He was upright and his Mexican counterpart was the corrupt, slothful, lecherous cliché. Instead, it’s the American detective, Quinlan – Welles – who is corrupt, overfed, shabbily dressed, reactionary and racist. By contrast, Vargas, the Mexican narcotics investigator played by Charlton Heston, is square, liberal, uptight, moralistic, and a workaholic unable to consummate his honeymoon with Susie, the luscious Janet Leigh, because of his commitment to solving the crime.”
Walter Murch has a deep appreciation for the innovative techniques employed in the movie by the legendary Hollywood filmmaker such as filming with a handheld camera (a French Camérette) and shooting on real locations at night. “In the denouement of Touch of Evil, Welles worked out something that’s very close to my heart because it’s so similar to the beginning of The Conversation – namely, to make the resolution of the story depend on different shadings and perspectives of sound. Quinlan and Menzies are walking through this maze of oil derricks at night, and unknown to Quinlan, Menzies is wired for sound with a radio mic hidden under his jacket. Some distance away, Vargas is following them with a radio receiver, picking up their conversation, hoping that Quinlan will incriminate himself. When you’re close to Quinlan and Menzies, they sound normal. When you’re with Vargas and his tape recorder, they sound distorted, like voices over a telephone. And when you’re far away from both the hunter and the hunted, you hear the voices in a sort of echoey field of sound. It’s all very dynamic with no musical accompaniment. This attention to detail pays off fantastically well when Quinlan and Menzies walk over a bridge and Vargas is forced to go under one of the archways of the bridge to stay close to them. And now Quinlan’s recorded voice, heard over the tape recorder, echoes within the archway. Quinlan suddenly stops, suspicious – he hears his own voice with the wrong echo on it. And he begins to work out what’s happening – that his buddy Menzies is carrying a hidden microphone and his enemy Vargas must be under the bridge with a recorder. So that echo – that particular quality of sound – causes the plot to unravel; Quinlan accuses Menzies, there is a struggle, Menzies is shot, then Quinlan goes after Vargas, and then is shot himself by the dying Menzies. Welles hung the whole ending of the film on the ability of the people in it, and the audience, to understand a subtle nuance with the sound. That it’s the wrong echo. It’s fantastic!”
Assessing the extensive corrections requested by Orson Welles, Walter Murch said, “When I started working on the project, I never expected that we could do everything he wanted. In my experience even if you have all the necessary resources, you’re lucky if seventy-five percent of the ideas pan out – a good rate of success for anybody’s notes about a film. But in this case every single one made the film better. Although there were some notes that mystified me, initially. It was only after I’d completed the work, and seen them within the context of the whole film that I realized what Welles was after.” Orson Welles had a great appreciation for the craft of film editing. “He once said in an interview in Cahiers du Cinéma, ‘For my style, for my vision of cinema, editing is not simply one aspect; it’s the aspect’,” recalled Walter Murch. “The only time one is able to exercise control over the film is in the editing. The images themselves are not sufficient. They’re very important but they’re only images. What’s essential is the duration of each image and that which follows each image; the whole eloquence of cinema is that it’s achieved in the editing room.”
Recruited for a second time by Anthony Minghella, Walter Murch performed the dual tasks of film editor and re-recording mixer for The Talented Mr. Ripley (1999). Sent to Italy to bring a playboy (Jude Law) back home to America, Ripley (Matt Damon) decides instead to assume his identity with deadly consequences. “I think it identifies a fear that is more urgent now than it was 50 years ago when the book was written,” commented Minghella on the story created by novelist Patricia Highsmith, “which is the degree to which we are hostage to messages of inadequacy, the degree to which we are told that who we are and what we are is essentially unworthy, and that what we should do is aspire to be an other.”
To depict the themes of the picture cinematically, the clothing of the title character played a fundamental role. “The costume designer can say, ‘This character Tom Ripley wants to be certain kind of person but he really is another kind of person,” remarked Walter Murch. “So I’m going to dress him in a way that reveals, profoundly but subtly, the contradiction in him. Everything is perfect, except his shoes…When you look at his shoes, you realize he’s not the person he has presented himself to be’. The director and the cameraman and the actor can take advantage of that by having him cross his legs and unconsciously reveal to the world that his shoes are wrong.” One thing Matt Damon and Anthony Minghella tried to avoid was making the title character entirely unsympathetic. “We wanted Ripley’s humanity to come across,” stated Damon. “In the book he’s this awful, calculating person, but Anthony and I tried to have him not ever manipulate anybody and come from a position of pure honesty all the time. He believes what’s happening and he believes the world he’s indulging in.”
Director and writer Anthony Minghella saw Walter Murch not as a hired hand but as an indispensable collaborator. “Walter has become inextricably bound up with my ideas about film, with my plans as a filmmaker. His rigour in the cutting room; the standards he has set for himself and expects of his collaborators; the tacit understanding that he is a fellow filmmaker, a peer, not a servant of the director; his profound grasp of every aspect of the filmmaking process – these make him a partner, an exhilarating one.” Mingella found his time spent with the veteran post-production craftsman to be very educational. “Among the many things Walter has taught me is the necessity for every element in the film to work, and to be working in concert. His technique of lining the cutting room with stills extracted from each of the movie’s setups is a constant reminder that each cut affects the entire movie, that each sequence lives inside a gestalt that internal rhymes in a scene have to relate to the larger rhymes.”
“I discovered something, working on Ripley, that I was amazed I hadn’t discovered before,” stated the meticulous Murch. “Statistically, a blink will most often happen when the actor is speaking a nonvocalized consonant. I think they’re called fricative consonants: an “s” an “f”, “th”, but not “d” (uh) – “d” has a vocal component to it. If somebody is speaking, the blinks tend to happen on “s’s” or “th’s” – sounds like that.” Anthony Minghella was a kindred spirit. “To be honest, I have no interest in the finished product at all,” confessed Minghella. “I am obsessive about it up until the minute I’ve delivered it. Obsessive! I eat, sleep, drink it, I get up in the middle of the night and work on it….I will never stop working. I can’t bear to let it go…there was a courier each day outside the mixing room to take it away from us so it would be released on time. I’m a maniac and I work with other maniacs…John Seale, Walter Murch….The minute it’s gone, I have no interest in it whatsoever. I don’t mean that in a stupid way – of course I am delighted and honoured that people will come and see the film. But it’s too masochistic to think about what we’ve done. I haven’t seen The English Patient since the day we delivered it – or The Talented Mr Ripley.” The American Cinema Editors nominated Walter Murch for Best Edited Feature Film while he contended for Best Editing at the Satellite Awards.
Contacted by American filmmaker Francis Ford Coppola, who wanted to make a DVD version of the picture which awarded Walter Murch his first Oscar in 1979, Murch next found himself revisiting the madness of the Vietnam War.
Continue to part four.
For more on Walter Murch, be sure to visit FilmSound.org and NPR, while Michael Ondaatje’s The Conversations: Walter Murch and the Art of Editing Film provides a comprehensive analysis of Murch’s career.
You can also show your appreciation and discuss his body of work on the Walter Murch Facebook page.
Walter Murch lecture – part one and part two.
Trevor Hogg is a freelance video editor and writer who currently resides in Canada.
